In this week’s automation news, Google’s Vice President and Head of Finance, Kristin Reinke, has announced that Alphabet Inc. is set to automate as many financial tasks as possible to reduce the manual work completed by staff.
This follows an interview with The Wall Street Journal in which Reinke explained that the software company, based in California, is using artificial intelligence, the cloud, raw data and machine learning to digitalise its financial operations.
In the article, Reinke said:
“Anything that can be automated, we strive to automate… There’s so much judgment that is required as a finance organization, and that’s something that you can’t automate, but you can automate the more routine activities of a finance organization by giving them these tools.”
Kristin Reinke, The Wall Street Journal
As it stands, Google still uses spreadsheets and other tools that are not able to be automated. However, Reinke explained that their focus is on how automation can improve processes and improve the business’s ability to partner with its clients and reinvest the time it’s saved into the next business challenge.
Google already seems to be seeing the benefits of these changes as the combination of the digital tools takes 1-2 hours and improves the quality of the analysis as the company is able to spot trends quicker and can diagnose outliers. However, there is still much more to be done.
“This tool uses machine learning to generate accurate forecasts, and it outperforms the manual, analyst-developed forecast in 80% of the cases”
Kristin Reinke, The Wall Street Journal
If you would like to learn more about the world of automation, feel free to browse some of our other articles here.
